About three hours ago the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, launched the fastest plane ever into the sky. The Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 is still in research and development, but had its second test run today. And how fast was the plane flying in its test run? The Falcon HTV-2 is supposed to fly through the atmosphere at 13,000 mph. That’s 20 times faster than the speed of sound, and fast enough to fly from New York to Los Angeles in 12 minutes.

From that we know all was going well until the craft entered its glide phase and lost communication with DARPA’s monitoring stations. DARPA’s Twitter feed tell us that the HTV-2 launched around 8 am PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and was successfully boosted into the Earth’s atmosphere at near orbital speeds by the Minotaur IV Lite launch vehicle. The HTV-2 then separated from the rocket and used its Reaction Control System to orient itself for reentry. After entering a reentry phase, the craft entered a pull-up phase to control the speed and altitude of the glide.

Once in the glide phase, the HTV-2 was supposed to perform maneuvers to test the aircraft’s aerodynamic performance. The last phase was to be its Terminal Phase, which has the aircraft roll and dive into the ocean to end the flight.

DARPA said in a Twitter post that it lost telemetry with the unmanned aircraft after the Glide Phase about two hours ago. The latest Tweet from DARPA says that “downrange assets did not reacquire tracking or telemetry.” DARPA tweeted that the HTV-2 has an autonomous flight termination capability and it would update us with more info.

On the Falcon HTV-2’s first flight, DARPA also lost contact with the vehicle nine minutes into the flight before completing its controlled landing in the ocean. The first flight proved it could travel 3.6 miles per second and still maintain GPS signals.

The intent of the second flight was to perform more tests while the plane is in flight to increase DARPA’s technical understanding of the hypersonic flight regime. The testing is something that can’t fully be replicated on the ground and must be tested in the air to validate the assumptions of DARPA’s aerospace engineers.

Monitoring stations along the craft’s flight path over the Pacific Ocean could not find the HTV-2, which means the craft is still MIA. We will keep you updated when we hear the latest news from DARPA about the status of the HTV-2.

Reader Comments

The Pope From TV

Going 3.6 miles per second, if DARPA was sure that HPV-2 crashed within 1 minute of it losing GPS signal, they would have to search roughly 183.6 miles of land (or more likely water) to find it. If it lost GPS signal because of a malfunction in its system and crashed afterward, within a window of 4 minutes, that search area would have been expanded to about 730 miles. Good luck, DARPA.

http://about.me/techncode Mauricio E.T.

Skynet.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2LDPINJ7MVBF34FUYLGXQUDELE Chris

The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America’s deep space probes. In a freak mishap, Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William “Buck” Rogers, are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life support systems and returns Buck Rogers to Earth…500 years later.